Category Archives: Edge

I love great conversations about technology – especially ones where the answer is not very neatly settled into winners and losers (which is ALL of them in IT). I’m excited that RackN has (re)launched the L8ist Sh9y (aka Latest Shiny) podcast around this exact theme.

Please check out the deep and thoughtful discussion I just had with Mark Thiele (notes) of Aperca where we covered Mark’s thought on why public cloud will be under 20% of IT and culture issues head on.

While the RackN team and I have been heads down radically simplifying physical data center automation, I’ve still been tracking some key cloud infrastructure areas. One of the more interesting ones to me is Edge Infrastructure.

This once obscure topic has come front and center based on coming computing stress from home video, retail machine and distributed IoT. It’s clear that these are not solved from centralized data centers.

While I’m posting primarily on the RackN.com blog, I like to take time to bring critical items back to my personal blog as a collection. WARNIING: Some of these statements run counter to other industry. Please let me know what you think!

By far the largest issue of the Edge discussion was actually agreeing about what “edge” meant. It seemed as if every session had a 50% mandatory overhead in definitioning. Putting my usual operations spin on the problem, I choose to define edge infrastructure in data center management terms. Edge infrastructure has very distinct challenges compared to hyperscale data centers. Read article for the list...

Running each site as a mini-cloud is clearly not the right answer. There are multiple challenges here. First, any scale infrastructure problem must be solved at the physical layer first. Second, we must have tooling that brings repeatable, automation processes to that layer. It’s not sufficient to have deep control of a single site: we must be able to reliably distribute automation over thousands of sites with limited operational support and bandwidth. These requirements are outside the scope of cloud focused tools.

If “cloudification” is not the solution then where should we look for management patterns? We believe that software development CI/CD and immutable infrastructure patterns are well suited to edge infrastructure use cases. We discussed this at a session at the OpenStack OpenDev Edge summit.

What do YOU think? This is an evolving topic and it’s time to engage in a healthy discussion.